Archive for July, 2009
The site is dubbed “where dreams become heart attacks”. Nuf said. Included in the pictures above are:
- Double Cheesburger Po-Boy, a 14 inch po-boy filled with eight six ounce cheeseburger patties.
- The Miles Dog, a hot dog covered with cheese, tomatoes, grilled onions, ketchup, guacamole, and several slices of bacon.
- The Scooby Snack, a hamburger patty topped with a lorne sausage, cheese, bacon, egg and a potato scone served on a square bun.
Check out the site.
Ghostly Discover iPhone App.
Jul 29
I read about this iPhone App today in Creativity magazine. It’s dubbed as a mood-based radio app and it’s available today in the App store. The user selects a color on a mood wheel that best represents his or her current state and voila the app creates a music playlist from Ghostly’s music catalog. The user also has other controls available to him such as digital vs. organic and faster vs. slower. I like the idea of utilizing mood as your main navigational focus. In that respect, this app reminds me a bit of Getty’s Moodstream project from over a year ago. Check out that project here. http://moodstream.gettyimages.com
With WideNoise you can monitor the noise levels around you, everywhere you go. You can also check the online map to see the average sound level of the area around you. Do you live in a “sleeping cat area” or in a more noisy “rock concert area”?
Check them out. http://www.widetag.com/widenoise/
Another great example of a brand aggregating and leveraging distributed social content in a branded site. In this case, all of these images are pulled in via Flickr’s API. The site looks great and is dead simple to use. If the content is out there, then a brand might as well embrace it.
HTC releases 4 more promo clips for the Hero. Nice, but still not enough for me to convert from iPhone.
The latest Android-powered smartphone from HTC looks great and enticing as a smart, featured-rich device, but for me it always comes down to the fact that Apple’s iTunes and App Store are on a completely different level than any other handset OEM’s service platform and App store. Even if another handset OEM releases a device on par with the iPhone, it still only has half of the equation solved. The bigger battleground in the smartphone wars will be on the service platform and App store side of the equation. Android is definitely making moves, but they’re still playing Single-A ball, while Apple is sitting lovely in the majors.
Gracenote takes on Shazam with the recent release of it’s MusicID iPhone App created by Gravity Mobile. Like Shazam, users can hold up their iPhone to identify music that’s playing. Once the track is identified, users can click through and buy it at Apple’s iTunes Store. The app is powered by a database of over 100 million tracks and performs over four billion searches a month.
Here are some great pull-quotes from the article.
“In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing. Only 7% said we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”
“Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase. The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much. This is huge.”
Here’s another similar POV from Forbes Magazine.
A $65 Billion Advertising Shift?
More and more marketers are pulling out of traditional ad channels and spending it on themselves.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/21/advertising-marketing-business-media-stratigos.html
There’s been a lot of positive buzz around social media and the basketball world lately, but not everything that social media and the basketball world produces is good. Maybe too much access to athletes can be a bad thing. Check out these weird turn of events.
“Stephon Marbury plays a song called “Lean On Me” by Kirk Franklin on his laptop and then starts crying. I don’t know why he cries. Maybe it’s a cry for help? This happened on July 25, 2009 at about 5:24 to 5:29am. This is from his live broadcast”. -DDKTien
Ruder Finn just released an interesting study called the Ruder Finn Intent Index which tries to define the reasons for why people go online. In the study, Ruder Finn categorizes those reasons into 7 main buckets which are: 1. Learn, 2. Have Fun, 3. Socialize, 4. Express Yourself, 5. Advocate, 6. Do Business, and 7. Shop.
The site describes Ruder Finn’s Intent index as “an ongoing online research study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the underlying motivations or reasons people go online-their intent. The intent index underscores the emerging trend that people’s online behavior is better explained and understood by similarities in intent rather than by demographic differences between them. This has profound implications for professionals embarking on PR, advertising and marketing campaigns.”
Some of the findings in the study include:
- More than twice as many people go online to socialize (82%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%).
- 72% of people go online just to become part of a community.
- More than 3 in 5 Americans (63%) go online to influence others’ opinions or express contrasting or oppositional views.
Augmented ID is a TAT concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life. With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you. All users control their own augmented appearance, by selecting the content and social network links they want show to others.
There’s a lot going on at MoMA this summer and MoMa is putting out this nice little tool to help you plan your visit. The customized MoMA summer planner will help you tailor your MoMA experience based on your profile and personality.
Check out the site. http://mydayat.moma.org/home.html
An extract of Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard, and Bob Greenberg, CEO of digital agency R/GA, sharing a vision for how brands can embrace the cloud, transform their relationships with consumers and build sustainable platforms for marketing programmes.
BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Page chats about blogola and what’s wrong with Mommy Bloggers.
Jul 25
BlogHer.com, the online female community that logs 15 million unique visitors a month, is currently holding it’s fifth annual convention this week in Chicago. In a pre-conference interview, BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Page mentions that the mere disclosure that a blogger is accepting money to include product mentions in a post is not enough to solve the blogola problem. Also, check out the link to the 9 minute video where Ms. Page waxes on how brands and agencies are screwing up in their efforts to deepen relationships with the mommy bloggers. As brand marketers rush to generate brand exposure across social media, many brand marketers and agencies are actually pissing off the mommy blogger community.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1370868150/bctid30191522001
Here’s the exclusive video of LeBron James getting dunked on by Xavier star Jordan Crawford. I’m not sure what all the commotion was all about. The dunk wasn’t that impressive and everyone gets dunked on eventually. We all need to re-focus our energies on petitioning Lebron to sign with the Knicks in 2010. These little details of Lebron getting dunked on during a useless summer recreation game mean nothing.
Posted via web from Flytip.com
NRU, an app that shows off Zagat data, by just pointing your iPhone around, is now out in the iPhone app store. Marko Balabanovic, head of innovation at http://www.lastminute.com labs in London, UK, gives us a sneak peak. Yelp.com is rumored to be working on a similar app.
* At the moment it is only in English, and only available for Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Read more about it on lastminute’s blog.
Download now or listen on posterous
